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Music! Obviously, you listen to it while you’re working or chilling at home. You definitely pump it when you’re at a party, or you’re in your car. Do you use it at your table?
I’ve been gaming for a long time. Just a touch over two decades, which makes me a bit old. I never really saw the point of having music at the table, but over the last year I’ve mad a concerted effort. There’s just something about 4e that makes you want to go all out on the “production” of your game. You’ve set out the dungeon tiles, you have the minis, why not add the soundtrack, right?
I figured it was worth the experiment and after a few sessions I haven’t turned back. Music creates great ambiance for your game. The main obstacles for you as the GM are keeping control of the music (as opposed to the music holding the leash) and what do you play? I’ll talk about the former first and over the month I’ll make recommendations for how to get playlists at the table.
Setting up
Basic tips for setting up your music:
- Fill the room with sound. For the best effect, you want music at a volume where it can be a part of the experience. Too loud, and you drown out the conversations that need to occur, but too soft and your ambiance is just white noise –meaningless at best, a low-pitched distraction at worst. You need music that won’t go away the second people start gabbing.
- Get speakers. I know it’s tempting to just play off your laptop, but the acoustics are horrible. It’s impossible to get it set up at room-filling volume without drowning out your players. Since the music will be right there with you, your players will constantly be competing with it for you to hear them. Get speakers.
- Put the speakers under the table. This is a trick that I found after much experimentation. It lets you fill the room, but since the sound is under the table, lets you and your players easily converse while the music is at a considerable volume. Since speakers with decent subwoofers are cheap these days, get a set of those and get a little bass that the players can feel as well.
- Keep your music at hand. I really don’t suggest using an ipod or other mp3 if you can help it –it’s a little too fiddly. A computer and music software is perfect. You can set up playlists, set up shuffling of the playlist songs, even set up layered soundscapes (with the help of a program called Softrope which I will cover later). You don’t ever want to Spend several minutes tinkering around with your music selection. Have a game plan of what you want to use beforehand, so it’s quick and fluid.
- Keep it varied. The only bad thing I can say about music is this: If you have a weekly game, you and your players are going to get bored of the same old stuff. I think that the help of the lists I’ll share will help build a library for you, but don’t expect to get a few CDs and just use them over and over, unless you pride yourself on a high player suicide rate. Easy ways to keep the music varied is to solicit suggestions from your players. My players have gotten some great stuff into the game, stuff I never would have thought of. Don’t take the burden of this on yourself. Get players involved in the music selection, and get them to bring in the stuff they suggest. There’s no reason you have to go broke (or spend a ton of time on torrent sites for you really naughty people out there ) trying to keep a wide music selection. Make it a group effort.
- Keep it familiar. I love giving contradictory advice. What I’m saying here though is that familiarity can work for you. If you have one song that is for a recurring villain, or a song that’s attached to a town or an event…you can evoke these things without having to say a word. Players can know parts of the game world through not only your descriptions, but with sounds and songs. It’s powerful. If you get into this I suggest you make short playlists appropraitely labelled so you can push one button quickly to evoke the desired place or person.
Next Friday we’re going to look at some software that can help you out, and then…playlists. A lot of music will be discussed.
Let me know what you want to see, and share your tips for using music in your 4e games here!
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A Jack of All Trades ,or if you prefer, an extreme example of multi-classing, Gamefiend, a.k.a Quinn Murphy has been discussing, playing and designing games straight out of the womb. He is the owner and Editor-in-Chief of this site in addition to being an aspiring game designer. As you would assume, he is a huge fan of 4e.
By day he is a technologist.
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I really like to use http://www.radiorivendell.com – they have lots of good tracks from fantasy movies and games and there’s no playlist to mess with as you just listen to whatever they’re streaming. There have been a few times were players at the table have commented “Hey! That’s from Lord of the Rings!” or some such like that, getting the players even more excited due to the soundtrack of their current encounter. The Radio Rivendell website also has a pretty long list of downloadable fantasy-based music ( http://www.radiorivendell.com/index.php?pageId=21 ) in case you prefer to setup different playlists for “in town”, “in the forest”, or “boss battle”.
I humbly suggest Media Monkey as the pinnacle of music management software. Blows everything else out of the water, in terms of managing a large library.
Only downside is the less-than-perfect support for newer iPods. That’s not their fault, of course. They do the best they can– and do pretty well, actually– but Apple’s defective-by-design mentality makes 3rd party iPod support an uphill battle.
I’ll put in a plug for Pandora. I have a doc for my iPhone plugged into a nice set of computer speakers. I usually start a station with a song from one of Brian Eno’s Ambient albums. After a few sessions of rating the selections to weed out the electronica and new-agey stuff, I now have a nice random playlist of haunting background music that doesn’t detract from play.
i’ve been trying this out the last few weeks: email the track to the PC’s a few days before, let them listen and imagine what it might be connected to, and bam! that music just got pivotal
I’m curious to see where this series goes and hopes it gets continued soon. A year or so ago I started using music in our games and it’s been a significantly positive addition.
At the risk of being two cents poorer, here’s my take. When it works well, nobody notices it most of the time. Every now and then the mood at the table and the music come together in perfect harmony, and everyone gets a stupid happy grin on their face at how awesome that moment was.
When it doesn’t work well, it’s because the DJ has put on a track that isn’t quite right, or there’s just something off-mood in the music. Or the track volume is too high or low. Or someone is fiddling with the playlist. Any of these problems can be jarring.
But the main issue for me is playlist management. I’m in the process of tagging all my music in MediaMonkey with things like “Suspense”, “Stealth”, “Horror”, “Combat”, “Sacred”, “Exotic”, etc. I’m hoping some day building a playlist will be a rather quick and easy process and not the fairly time-consuming chore it is now.
Huh. Much of my gaming music can be downloaded free and legally. I’d be happy to email you links and suggested tags if you wanted to run a “Gaming Music of the Week” series.